As I pointed out last time (last month, last year!), Carl Estabrook's notion of the difference between poetry and verse--"Poetry is a matter of tropes, and verse, of word-schemes"--is pretty silly. But it's not his fault. Though there certainly is a difference, exactly what it is has never been clear, and in the last century it became more obscure than ever because, for the first time, it became generally accepted that one could write poetry without writing verse.
Now, I'm a long way from most of my books, and a long way from a library, so what I have to say in answer to the inevitable question "What about Blake, Whitman, the King James Psalms, and 'For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry'?" is primarily based on the third chapter of a book I do happen to have with me, Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter. It would be based on that excellent book if I were sitting in the Reading Room of the Library at the British Museum. My few following paragraphs cannot possibly convey the force and learning of his 60 pages of clear, finely argued, and densely referenced text. Buy the book, if you're at all interested in what happened to English-language poetry in the 20th century.
Steele convincingly demonstrates that while for the ancients poetry is something more than verse, the idea that poetry is something distinct from verse first appeared among the Renaissance Aristotelians. It seems an odd distinction to us: the essential quality of poetry, they claimed, is mimesis, the imitation rather than the reporting of action. In other words, poets weren't allowed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They had to make something up: poetry had to be fiction, and the best fictions, whether in prose or verse, were poetry, and Dante, because he did not "imitate," was, for some, no poet.
There things stood for nearly four centuries, with different writers excluded or included in the ranks of poets by virtue of whether or not they "imitated": Du Bartas put out by Jonson, Crashaw by Pope, and all the metaphysicals by Johnson; Herodutus (whom Aristotle had excluded) included by Shelley, Burnet by Coleridge. Poets, nevertheless, continued writing verse, with occasional but uninfluential exceptions. No one but Christopher Smart imitated the Psalms, and no one imitated Jubilate Deo before the 20th century.
Then everything changed. In other chapters, Steele examines the mostly baleful influence on metrical poetry of French vers libre, aesthetic philosophy, misunderstood scientific method (just what are the controls in a poetic experiment?), and the rise of the novel. Here he concentrates on Eliot's essay on Kipling, which argues that, for the most part, Kipling wrote verse and not poetry. Eliot advances several distinctions between verse and poetry to support this opinion:
-verse is craft; poetry is art
-verse is straightforward in purpose; poetry is indirect
-verse has a clearly articulated structure; that of poetry is intuitive and musical
-verse does not "revolutionize"; poetry does
All but the first of these is new. Incredibly, at least to me, they have become so conventional that almost no one thinks about them and they seem to have been always true. They are certainly part of the background of Mr. Estabrooks's confusion. However, as Steele points out, if these new criteria are applied consistently, most of English poetry before Eliot becomes "mere" verse. Bully for Eliot, eh?
5:10:47 PM 
|
|
